We develop the theory of cofinal types of ultrafilters over measurable cardinals and establish its connections to Galvin’s property. We generalize fundamental results from the countable to the uncountable, but often in surprisingly strengthened forms, and present models with varying structures of the cofinal types of ultrafilters over measurable cardinals.

We answer a question of Blass, Di Nasso, and Forti [2, 7] by proving, assuming Continuum Hypothesis or Martin’s Axiom, that (1) there exists a P-point which is not interval-to-one and (2) there exists an interval-to-one P-point which is neither quasi-selective nor weakly Ramsey.

It is proved that the Continuum Hypothesis implies that any sequence of rapid P-points of length ${<}\mathfrak{c}^{+}$ that is increasing with respect to the Rudin–Keisler ordering is bounded above by a rapid P-point. This is an improvement of a result from B. Kuzeljevic and D. Raghavan. It is also proved that Jensen’s diamond principle implies the existence of an unbounded strictly increasing sequence of P-points of length $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}_{1}$ in the Rudin–Keisler ordering. This shows that restricting to the class of rapid P-points is essential for the first result.

We study ultrafilters on ω2 produced by forcing with the quotient of ${\cal P}$(ω2) by the Fubini square of the Fréchet filter on ω. We show that such an ultrafilter is a weak P-point but not a P-point and that the only nonprincipal ultrafilters strictly below it in the Rudin–Keisler order are a single isomorphism class of selective ultrafilters. We further show that it enjoys the strongest square-bracket partition relations that are possible for a non-P-point. We show that it is not basically generated but that it shares with basically generated ultrafilters the property of not being at the top of the Tukey ordering. In fact, it is not Tukey-above [ω1]<ω, and it has only continuum many ultrafilters Tukey-below it. A tool in our proofs is the analysis of similar (but not the same) properties for ultrafilters obtained as the sum, over a selective ultrafilter, of nonisomorphic selective ultrafilters.

We prove the existence of p-ideals that are nonmeagre subsets of (ω) under various set-theoretic assumptions.